Photo: Anna Graves

Three Decades Later: From San Francisco to Washington, DC

May 1, 2009

Thirty years ago today I lay down in the doorway of a modest one-story building on the University of California’s Laguna Honda campus in San Francisco—and unwittingly began a journey that I have been on ever since, right up to this week’s events in Washington, DC.

On May 1, 1979 the board of regents of the university met to deliberate on this question: is it appropriate for one of the world’s great universities to manage US government laboratories that invent and test atomic bombs? 

From the earliest days of the nuclear age, the University of California had, at least in name, been in charge of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in Livermore, California, forty miles east of San Francisco.  These two facilities had designed virtually the entire US nuclear arsenal.  At the beginning, there had been a kind of macabre prestige that worked both ways: the university was associated with the preeminent technological revolution of the modern era, while this revolution was legitimated by its association with the esteemed university.

It was the hope of the activists that gathered on that sunny May day three decades ago to help undermine this mutual legitimacy and, by ending the university’s management of these labs, to nudge our world one step closer to nuclear disarmament.

The day before I had read an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about this event. Without much thought, I decided to take the bus over from Berkeley (where I was a student at the Graduate Theological Union) and check it out. 

When I arrived, I was told that the group would try to get its point across (symbolizing the impact of a nuclear exchange by enacting a “die-in”) by laying down where the regents would be walking in and out.  I had never done this kind of thing before (my family was not political and I had voted for Gerald Ford in 1976) but I found myself deciding to attend the brief, on-the-spot nonviolence training—and then going ahead and plunking myself down in the doorway.

The one hour training was led, auspiciously, by Ched Myers, then an earnest, prophetic seminary student with whom I would collaborate, off and on, over the next few decades.  (For those of this ilk, I highly recommend his groundbreaking scripture study, Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Mark’s Story of Jesus.)

He gave the handful of us who had assembled the rudiments, including the Cliff’s Notes version of what to expect if we were arrested.

In fact, we were not arrested that day.  Governor Jerry Brown stood at the sidelines and cheered us on (he was urging the university to sever ties with the labs) and the regents walked gingerly over our prone bodies.  Eventually we got up and dusted ourselves off and went back to our everyday lives.

But for me I found that I could not simply go back to my ordinary life.  Like many in those days, I was drawn into trying to understand, and respond to, a world fraught with nuclear peril. 

I began to study what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called “nuclearism” (the culture of nuclear reality as it seeps into many parts of our lives and our societies) and I even wrote some unpublished fiction about an “ordinary person” who becomes an anti-nuclear activist. 

These were all preparations for the day when things would turn irrevocably and I would find myself acting my way into thinking to become a life-long agent for nonviolent change. 

This was not the route I had expected to take.

This past week I joined a few hundred people in Washington for prayer and action.  Led by Christian Peace Witness for Iraq, we marked the 100th day of President Obama’s new administration by calling for a definitive end to the US war in Iraq.  We also echoed Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s recent statement urging the new president to issue a formal apology to Iraq and the world for the US invasion and occupation. 

Since 1979, there have been many twists, turns, and detours along the way, but a resilient thread (forged of many elements, but most deeply a stubborn passion for a just and lasting peace) connects the events of this week at the White House with that simple moment three decades ago in the California sunshine.